Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior

In The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston makes her narration compelling and relatable to the audience through her unique style of storytelling. The ever-present changes in perspective lead one to see how each event eventually affects Kingston. Her comparison of her life to that of Fa Mu Lan brings out the difficulties in her living in America while her mother had grown up in China. This hero myth allows her to connect to those values that Brave Orchid holds which make her so hard on her daughter. The telling of Brave orchid’s talk-stories in first person makes their events more relatable to Kingston, which makes the 4th chapter’s telling in the third person all the more jarring and thought-provoking. All in all, Kingston’s writing style in this novel serves to make it evoke a powerful sense of relatability and understanding of her plight.

Throughout the novel The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston, the past is incorporated into the present through talk-stories combined into each chapter. Kingston uses talk-stories, to examine the intermingling of Chinese myths and lived experiences. These stories influence the life of the narrator as the past is constantly spoken about from the time she is young until the novel ends and she becomes an adult. Kingston incorporates two cultures. She is not a direct recipient of Chinese culture, but she has her own sense of talk-story, that she learns from her mother, which tells the old Chinese stories with a sense of myth, in a new American way. This is a way of weaving two cultures together, bringing the Chinese past into her present American life.

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston is a collection of memoirs, a blend of Kingston’s autobiography with Chinese folklore. The book is divided into five interconnected chapters: No Name Woman, White Tigers, Shaman, At the Western Palace, and A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe. In No Name Woman, three characters are present: Kingston, Kingston’s mother, and Kingston’s aunt. This section starts off with Kingston’s mother retelling the story of her aunt and her shameful past where her aunt took part in an adulterous relationship and expressed her sexuality openly, then Kingston’s interpretation of this story, and later what the story ultimately means to Kingston - the act of the family forgetting this

Justin Kim S. Kelly Eng Lang/ Comp Ap 11 August 2014 The Woman Warrior In The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Kingston illustrates the struggles and the sufferings Chinese women had to face. The author incorporates five anecdotes, each telling the life difficulties and sexism of Chinese women.

In the book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston, her experiences of being marginalized in society (even though she was born in the United States) contributed to the substance, behind her quest in working towards understanding her own identity. By writing the No Name Woman is the first step on that long road of Kingston and on her way reveals the cultural conflicts that have affected her life and believes (Kingston 3).

Initial Understanding. What are your thoughts and questions about the story? You might reflect upon characters, their problems, the title, or other ideas in the story.

Kingston slips this into the chapter by guessing that her dead aunt’s child is female since “there is some hope of forgiveness for boys” (Kingston 15). The subject of gender inequality shows up throughout the novel, such as when Kingston’s great uncle takes only the boys out to town, fully aware that the girls want to come, but leaving them at home “hanging [their] coats back up” (47). This issue is a global one; even in modern times, women are seen as inferior to men. In this memoir, gender inequality is one of the issues that Kingston is attempting to point out to us. Although not all of the readers are Chinese-American, Kingston transcends the cultural barrier to speak to the reader about her experiences with gender inequality and conflict.

In the essay, “No Name Woman,” Maxine Hong Kingston explores why her Chinese aunt drowned herself in the family well in China. This is one of the most difficult text I have read till now, because as I read the story it gets harder for you to understand the text and the tone of it. As I read on, the paragraph ends with “All of them sent money home” (606). At first i thought they referred to as the guys who smuggled their family members but after reading few more times I found out they referred to their family members in new world. After that confusing part comes and I find out that the aunt was pregnant and I knew that there was aunt in this story but where did this come from.

Through Kingston’s narration, her mother defeated a ghost and her village believed her to be a magician. Her mother calls white people ghosts and is sentimental about ghosts in China that did not take human forms. Kingston thinks that she still prefers America. The chapter on her mother reflects on the relationship she has with her. Her mom, independent and brilliant, contradicts the traditional motherly housewife picture. However, she reinforces the stereotype about Chinese women being useless by telling Kingston stories about the treatment of women. Kingston has difficulty labelling her mother as a role model or a traditionalist because she cannot tell whether or not her mother’s stories are all true. Kingston continues the use of the ghost motif and the consideration of how women should be

The Woman Warrior, the fictional non-fiction novel by Maxine Hong Kingston, despite its positive commercial and critical reception, has been the subject of controversies over the years, especially among Asian-American readers and critics. While it is easy to read the Orientalist elements in her book as betraying Kingston’s attempt to distance herself from her mother and the Chinese culture, or as an indication that she unconsciously normalizes Western cultural traditions and favors them over Eastern ones, it is, perhaps, a fairer and more beneficial interpretation to consider it as a meta-narrative that points out the problematic extent to which the Asian-American experience is misunderstood by being overly Orientalist. By employing a main

“No Name Woman” Essay Prompt In Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman” the author discusses the tale of her suicidal aunt, the “No Name Woman.” She illustrates her attitude towards her aunt through the perspectives of her mother, close relatives, and finally her own view. Kingston’s feelings for her aunt are torn between hatred and sympathy for the effigy that represents her brother’s dishonorable sister. She tries to find justification in the actions of her aunt that led to her demise. Through her essay she is able to display the hold that her aunt has on her and illustrate the connection that they share.

In “No Name Woman,” the repetition of the words black and white gives the impression of a yin yang symbol. Black represents the chaos, what the village tries to avoid. The white symbolizes tradition, what the village wants to continue. Roundness, another characteristic of the yin yang symbol, is used throughout the essay to show the continuation of tradition. The yin yang represents the balance, or equilibrium of the village.

Not all feminist literature has been the same. The Woman Warrior, a fantastic tale of a traditional Chinese childhood lived by none other than the Chinese-American author, Maxine Hong Kingston. The Chinese culture has their own standards regarding gender stereotypes, and the ethics are simple: A man provides for, protects, and manages the family, while the woman stays out of the way. Kingston even provides ghastly details regarding the birth of a female child to a poor family: “The midwife or relative would take the back of a girl baby’s head in her hand and turn her face into the ashes…it was very easy.” (Kingston) Of course, in the story, Kingston is treated rather reasonably by her parents, as they took care of her when she was sick with

Maxine Hong Kingston's novel The Woman Warrior highlights conflicting views of women that spans decades through autobiographical and biographical accounts to demonstrate the harmful impact of contradicting viewpoints on the functionality of a family that differs not only in generation but

She illustrates this by citing the example of Demosthenes, a Greek orator who overcame his “lisp” by practising speech. However, she also says that she might herself be incapable of it, given the fact that she possesses a “weak and wounded brain”. Here, she does not refer to her incapability as a poet, but of the “irreparability” consigned to her gender. This suggests the idea that her “weak and wounded brain” isn’t a construct of her own—but one which has been imposed on her. It is how women are perceived to be like, and also conditioned to believe of